Anna Karenina - Part 8

The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of

Levin's most painful days. It was the very busiest working time,

when all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of

self-sacrifice in labor, such as is never shown in any other

conditions of life, and would be highly esteemed if the men who

showed these qualities themselves thought highly of them, and if

it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this

intense labor were not so simple.

To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the

meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the

winter corn--all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to

succeed in getting through it all everyone in the village, from

the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three

or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer,

onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at

night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the

twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over

Russia.

Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in

the closest relations with the peasants, Levin always felt in

this busy time that he was infected by this general quickening of

energy in the people.

In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye,

and to the oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and

returning home at the time his wife and sister-in-law were

getting up, he drank coffee with them and walked to the farm,

where a new thrashing machine was to be set working to get ready

the seed-corn.

He was standing in the cool granary, still fragrant with the

leaves of the hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled

aspen beams of the new thatch roof. He gazed through the open

door in which the dry bitter dust of the thrashing whirled and

played, at the grass of the thrashing floor in the sunlight and

the fresh straw that had been brought in from the barn, then at

the speckly-headed, white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in

under the roof and, fluttering their wings, settled in the

crevices of the doorway, then at the peasants bustling in the

dark, dusty barn, and he thought strange thoughts.

"Why is it all being done?" he thought. "Why am I standing here,

making them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show

their zeal before me? What is that old Matrona, my old friend,

toiling for? (I doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the

fire)" he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up

the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet

over the uneven, rough floor. "Then she recovered, but today or

tomorrow or in ten years she won't; they'll bury her, and

nothing will be left either of her or of that smart girl in the

red jacket, who with that skillful, soft action shakes the ears

out of their husks. They'll bury her and this piebald horse, and

very soon too," he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting

horse that kept walking up the wheel that turned under him. "And

they will bury her and Fyodor the thrasher with his curly beard

full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulders--they

will bury him. He's untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and

shouting to the women, and quickly setting straight the strap on

the moving wheel. And what's more, it's not them alone--me

they'll bury too, and nothing will be left. What for?"